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See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231951027 Philip Durkin, The Oxford guide to etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. x +350. Hardback £25.00. Article in English Language and Linguistics · March 2011 DOI: 10.1017/S1360674310000341 CITATIONS 0 READS 724 1 author: Paul Roberge University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 31 PUBLICATIONS 94 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE All content following this page was uploaded by Paul Roberge on 06 September 2017. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. REVIEWS 183 (Received 18 June 2010) doi:10.1017/S1360674310000341 Philip Durkin, The Oxford guide to etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. x +350. Hardback £25.00. Reviewed by Paul T. Roberge, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of Stellenbosch The term etymology, in the volume under review as in most modern discussions, is deﬁned as the investigation of word histories generally, and also as an account of the origin and historical development of individual words. As a scholarly practice, etymology has traditionally been concerned most especially (but not exclusively) with ‘those areas where there is a doubt about a stage in a word’s history, or where the documentary record fails us’ (p. 284; similarly, pp. 1, 291). Words and lexicalized phrases and their origins and shifting meanings are, obviously enough, of central concern to professional lexicographers, historical linguists and philologists. But they have intrigued non-specialist scholars and lay persons with a very wide variety of interests and intellectual backgrounds. The author of this work is principal etymologist for the Oxford English Dictionary and has lectured, broadcast and published regularly on English etymology. He addresses this practical introduction ‘to anyone who has taken the important ﬁrst step of realizing that etymologies are the result of research, and would like to discover something about the nature of that research, and the principles and methodologies which underlie it’ (p. ix). The take-away point for readers entirely new to the ﬁeld is that the compressed etymologies that one ﬁnds in many standard dictionaries are the product of extensive research, which can be difﬁcult and fraught with uncertainties. Durkin has further attempted ‘to frame this book so that it is addressed most centrally to someone who has an interest in historical linguistics . . . Etymology is a part of this wider ﬁeld, and anyone’s understanding of etymology will be greatly enriched by at least some acquaintance with the broader concerns of the discipline as a whole’ (p. ix). Most of the data are drawn from English. The narrow focus is offset by the opportunity for readers to avail themselves of current etymological research for the third edition of the OED, with which the author is personally involved. Though not unprecedented internationally (cf. Seebold 1981), a textbook dedicated speciﬁcally to etymology is very much to be welcomed. The book consists of nine substantive chapters and a brief conclusion, which are followed by a glossary, suggestions for further reading, references, a general index and an index of word forms. The ﬁrst chapter lays out some basic concepts (such as cognacy, language families, comparative and internal reconstruction), provides the rationale for the study of etymology and describes what an etymologist does. Oddly, perhaps, the 184 ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS term etymon, which would seem to fall into the category of ‘basic concepts’, is deﬁned quite precisely in the glossary but not upon its ﬁrst (p. 18) and subsequent occurrences; nor is it entered in the index. The histories of English friar and sad work well as Paradebeispiele. The presentation of Grimm’s and Verner’s Laws, as an illustration of the relationship between sound change and etymology and a demonstration of the comparative method, is clear and should be comprehensible to a general readership, though a chart or list of phonetic symbols used in the book might have been helpful. The establishment of manual ‘involving the hand, operated by the hand’ in English (from Latin manu¯ alis ←manus ‘hand’, via French) at the expense of Middle English handly and semantically narrowed handy ‘skilled with the hands, convenient to handle or use’ is a nice example of how heavy borrowing can alter diagrammatic patterns in word formation. Durkin takes pains to alert the neophyte to the existence of false cognates, such as English care beside Latin c¯ ura ‘care, concern, guardianship, administration’, Latin deus ‘god’ beside Greek θϵ ´os ‘god’, which show similarities in form and meaning but obtain from different roots, and the ‘etymological fallacy’, that is, the belief that knowledge of a word’s origin and particularly its original meaning should inform present-day usage. Chapter 2, entitled ‘What is a word? Which words need etymologies?’, deals with the linguistic unit that is central to lexicography and etymology. Durkin discusses the analysis of linguistic forms into words, showing how none of the conventional criteria (meaning, prosody, orthography, morphotactics) can be strictly applied. I was surprised to ﬁnd no mention of a long-established working deﬁnition of word as ‘a minimum free form’ (Bloomﬁeld 1933: 178). For present purposes, Durkin uses word rather loosely in the sense of lexeme (pp. 41, 296) and refers to words by their citation forms (lemmata, though Durkin eschews this term), that is, the word forms that conventionally represent the canonical forms of lexemes in dictionaries. Lexical innovation and integration may (but need not) progress along a developmental continuum: nonce formation (ad hoc coinage by individuals) > institutionalization (maintenance of semantic transparency, conventional use within a speech community ‘in a given context or with a fairly speciﬁc meaning’) > lexicalization (‘opaque – in meaning, or composition, or both’) (p. 49). Durkin is, of course, free to deﬁne his terms as he deems appropriate, but one would appreciate coherence and consistency in return. A statement that ‘institutionalized words . . . remain (at least relatively) transparent’ (p. 49) does not square with an allusion to ‘words with a non-predictable, institutionalized meaning’ a few pages later (p. 59). Nor does it help that the deﬁnition of institutionalized in the glossary (p. 292) refers to social norms with no mention of semantic transparency. Lexicalization (at least as I understand the term) refers to the expression of a concept by means of a word or the creation of a lexical unit out of a group of words, the meaning of which is beyond the sum of its parts. The concept ‘act of untrammeled power, enforcement of power’ is lexicalized in Afrikaans in a relatively transparent complex word (kragdadigheid) but not in English. (South African English has borrowed the Afrikaans word.) Strictly speaking, conventionalization and compositionality are conceptually independent phenomena. REVIEWS 185 The personal indiscretion of a politician has given American English hiking the Appalachian Trail, a new, non-compositional, abruptly lexicalized euphemism for ‘sneaking off with one’s lover’.4 While it may be feasible to compile an etymological dictionary that includes all of the extant words of a philological language (e.g. Lehmann 1986 for Gothic), this is obviously not practical for living languages, the lexicons of which are inﬁnitely extendible. Moreover, productive word-forming patterns, i.e. those capable of forming new words (e.g. afﬁxation in un-, pre-, re-, -ism, -ly), can generate an enormous number of one-off forms that are deployed within the context of particular utterances and are not stored in the mental dictionaries of the interlocutors. With these considerations in mind, Durkin sets the following priorities for etymological coverage: (i) monomorphemic words (acorn, lord, lady are informative examples discussed in this chapter); (ii) complex words containing semantically opaque bound elements (so-called ‘cranberry morphs’) that are obscure or foreign in origin (e.g. lukewarm, cranberry; cf. Low German kranebere, Standard German Kranbeere) or native fossils (e.g. winsome, raspberry); (iii) words that are formally analyzable but semantically non-compositional (e.g. penknife, handsome); (iv) idioms (e.g. to cut a caper ‘to make a playful, skipping movement, to act ridiculously’); and (v) ‘any word which has a form which is not explicable by the productive word-formation processes of the language’ (p. 59). Chapter 3, ‘Are words coherent entities?’, examines homonymy, polysemy, formal and semantic merger (or near-merger), and split in word form. Although one might cavil at the quirky title and the choice of merger and split over convergence and divergence (given the close association of the former with historical phonology), this chapter is quite solid. Durkin cautions that relations of polysemy and homonymy ﬂuctuate over time and can work in both directions. The English word crane in the meaning ‘machine for the hoisting and lowering of heavy objects’ is a metaphorical extension of crane ‘a type of long-legged, long-necked bird’. However, it is debatable whether contemporary speakers feel a connection between these senses, and the OED and other dictionaries treat them under separate lemmata. With regard to semantic convergence, Durkin recalls Bloomﬁeld’s (1933: 436) suggestion that since the loss of medial ∗-h- and of post-tonic vowels in English has made ear ‘spike or head of corn’ (< OE ¯ ear < ∗ahur < PGmc. ∗ahuz) homophonous with ear ‘organ for hearing’ (< OE ¯ eare < PGmc. ∗auz¯ o- or perhaps ∗auz¯ an), uploads/Litterature/ durkinreviewpublished-pdf.pdf